


Lullaby

by saintnoname



Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel (Movies)
Genre: Brainwashing, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, MCU/616 fusion, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, Red Room
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-05
Updated: 2013-02-05
Packaged: 2017-11-28 08:32:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/672380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saintnoname/pseuds/saintnoname
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The trigger is a song.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lullaby

**Author's Note:**

> The song in question is [Tchaikovsky's "Lullaby"](http://grooveshark.com/#!/s/Lullaby+Op+16+No+1/4lelpo?src=5). You might want to listen to it while you read.

The trigger is a song.

She’s lying in the arms of a man whose real name she doesn’t know—a man whose real name even he doesn’t know. Her fingers trail up and down the man’s metal arm and his flesh fingers stroke through her hair as he sings to her softly.

It’s a song she hasn’t heard since her childhood, and it’s not until she finishes the thought that she realizes its significance. Her body tenses at the implication of that thought.

The man holding her notices the change in her body language and stops singing. “What’s wrong?” he asks in her native tongue, a crease forming in his brow.

Natalia smiles weakly and shakes her head. “Nothing,” she answers in English. “Just keep singing.”

He does as he’s asked. As his fingers continue stroking through her hair, she remembers different fingers stroking through her hair. The fingers belong to a woman with hair as fiery as her own: her mother? She remembers soothing touches as the woman sings her to sleep. The woman would sing this exact song.

It doesn’t flood back all at once, as might be expected. One memory doesn’t lead to another; there’s no string of revelations. Just that one memory that she’s not even sure is real. It can be hard to tell what is real about her early life, with all her programming in the Red Room. Anything except the fire, that is, but she suspects that memory was implanted. She doesn’t know what really happened, and she doubts she ever will.

This memory, whether real or false, is soothing, and she allows herself to fall asleep against the man without a name.

It’s decades before she hears the song again.

She’s on a mission with Clint. Agent Barton. This should be like any other mission, except that she and Barton are pretending to be a couple.

She’d be lying if she said it was all pretend on her side. The man practically saved her. It’d be impossible for her not to harbor at least some feelings for him. Even she is unsure what those feelings are. Are they romantic? Are they sexual? Or maybe they’re completely platonic, or even familial. It’s too soon to tell and it’s all a jumble.

If, in time, she decides her feelings are something other than platonic, she’ll never act on them, anyway. She got too close to someone she worked with before, and it sends a chill down her spine to think of what happened to him. Their relationship had always been risky—something they’d both known from the start. But neither had gotten out of it unscathed. 

Even now, she has survivor’s guilt, although he didn’t die. Her guilt is for having gotten away with a less severe sentence than him. She knows SHIELD is different, but she needs only think of the man without a name, and remember seeing him on ice, and it’s enough to deter her. So nothing can ever happen between herself and Clint, no matter what her feelings might be. Or so she keeps telling herself.

Her face must be betraying her thoughts, because Clint brushes her hair back with a concerned look. “What’s wrong, Natasha?”

She shakes her head, forcing a smile. To his credit, Clint doesn’t press it, instead nodding in understanding. He remains silent after that.

It’s a starry night, and they’re at an outdoor late-night event. There are twinkling lights overhead and well-dressed couples spinning on the dance floor. She and Clint are among them when that song starts to play.

It hits her like a punch in the gut. She pulls Clint closer as the memories some flooding back. She remembers sitting by the fireplace with the red-haired woman who could only be her mother. But this time, there’s a man there, as well—her father. She’s sitting in his lap as he bounces her on his knee.

This time, unlike the last time, the memories do come back in droves. It’s almost too much for her to handle all at once. She doesn’t even notice her knees have gone weak until she feels Clint steady her.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asks.

Natasha nods again, taking his hand and leading him to a bench. “I’ll be fine,” she assures him. “I just need to sit down.

She really won’t be fine. Because she’s just gotten confirmation through her memories that there was no fire.

The Red Room was smart. They programmed in fail-safes in case anything like this were to happen.

The trigger is a word.

She’s undercover at the Bolshoi Theatre when she hears it. It’s an uncommon word that works only when spoken in Russian; the Red Room was smart. They didn’t want to make it too easy to unmake her.

When she hears the word, she loses everything from before or after her time in the Red Room. In her mind, she’s a young woman fresh out of training. One second, she’s just finished a sparring match and the next, she’s...well, she’s not exactly sure where she is. She’s a couple inches taller than she was a second ago, and she realizes it’s because she’s in heels. She’s wearing a nice dress, too, and her hair is done up. Everyone else is dressed nicely, too.

Trying not to draw too much attention to herself, she exits the building. Once outside, she reads the sign to find out where she is. The Bolshoi Theatre. What’s she doing there? 

She manages to find her way back to the hotel where she’s staying. It takes some time for her to figure out why she’s there, but by going through her belongings, she figures it out. She has trouble believing it’s the truth, because if it is, that means it’s decades later than she thought it was, and it means she’s on the wrong side.

No, she would never be on the “wrong side.” Where and when she is is exactly where and when she’s supposed to be. Maybe she’s a double agent, or this is a new life-lie that they’ve fitted for her. That would explain the time jump. Either way, her best bet is to go along with this Agent of SHIELD act.

Even doing her best, it doesn’t take long for her fellow agents to find out what’s wrong with her. The technology is too different, and she fumbles with it even with her trigger-fast learning. She doesn’t know anyone’s names, and has to admit what’s wrong when she’s told to speak to Director Fury, but doesn’t know who he is.

It takes quite a while for them to bring her up to speed, but even still, this whole thing is too surreal. It feels unsettlingly like her time in the Red Room. She knows for a fact that they planted memories in her head. In this case, she’s having her life explained to her by other people. Without the real memories of the things these agents are describing, she has no guarantee that they’re telling the truth. All she has to go on is trust.

Trust can be a scary thing, even dangerous—especially in her line of work. Or former line of work, as she’s been told. It doesn’t matter what she’s been told; her mindset is still that of a Russian spy.

In time, she falls into routine and starts to fit in with the rest of the team. She even begins to remember things that occurred during that gap. She remembers dancing under the moonlight with Clint. She does not remember that she once thought she might be in love with him. She even thinks she can remember the mission she was on when she blacked out, and feels regret that her memory loss prevented her from completing the mission. There are times when she thinks she can recall certain incidents as they’re described to her.

But the problem is that she doesn’t know if she’s actually remembering these events or if it’s a trick of her mind. If she wants to remember so badly that she starts to believe she remembers what she doesn’t. Her grip on reality has never been faultier. She throws herself into her work in an effort to distract herself, and becomes the most competent agent SHIELD has ever known.

It’s years before she hears the song again.

SHIELD has found a man like her. James Barnes is his name. He was brainwashed by the Soviets, like her. His mind has been made and unmade as many times as her own, but his memories are intact. They weren’t when SHIELD first found him. They had specifically kept Natasha in the dark about the case until the man was presented with the Cosmic Cube and his brainwashing undone. She couldn’t understand why SHIELD had been so hesitant to let her get involved until she learned it was personal for her.

This man had trained her back when she’d worked for the KGB. As soon as she learns this, she latches onto the man. Here is someone who knows exactly what she’s been through. Not only that, but he’s someone who can fill her in on her history before she joined SHIELD.

They start spending more and more time together, but he remains vague on the subject of their shared histories.

“You really don’t remember anything?” he asks cautiously.

She shakes her head.

James smiles sadly. “I remember everything from that time, Natasha. Everything.” He pauses and looks at her. “And you were the only good thing in it.”

She suddenly understands his reluctance to divulge too much about their past. From his statement and the way it is spoken, she knows they were lovers once.

It makes sense. He’s a handsome and charming man she’s developed a reluctant fondness for. But now there’s something more there, too. There’s a bond between them. She hasn’t known him for very long, despite the fact that he trained her, but from the start, she’s felt this bond, if for no other reason than that simply by virtue of their having shared similar experiences they understand something about each other that nobody else understands about either one.

So now, she takes his hand in hers. There’s a ghost of a smile on his face as his thumb strokes the back of her hand. It’s not a sad smile like before, and it looks good on him. She can’t help a smile of her own, and she leans in to brush her lips against hers.

It’s a brief and gentle kiss that hardly qualifies as a kiss at all, but his face lights up like it’s Christmas. 

It’s then that he starts to talk about their past. She smiles at his stories. Unlike with the stories SHIELD told her, she doesn’t care if these stories are true; they’re nice to hear either way.

He comes to a point where he’s telling her about a time when he sang her Tchaikovsky’s Lullaby. Natasha tilts her head with an inquisitive smile. “Tchaikovsky’s Lullaby? How does that go?”

He chuckles self-deprecatingly and shakes his head. “Trust me, you don’t want to hear me sing.”

“Yes, I do,” she presses.

“Well, okay. If you insist...”

He sings the song softly, fingers combing through her hair.

And she remembers everything.


End file.
